


Cookies

by starsandgutters



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Fluff, M/M, Schmoop, baking!fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-11
Updated: 2013-12-11
Packaged: 2018-02-18 06:05:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,751
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2337899
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starsandgutters/pseuds/starsandgutters
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“You…don’t know?”<br/>“Yeah, that’s what I said, Cas. Did I freakin’ stutter?”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cookies

**Author's Note:**

> For [Yasmine](http://ethicalmadness.tumblr.com), who requested prompt number 20 from [this meme](http://starsandgutters.co.vu/post/67289726727): Cookies.

“You…don’t know?”

“Yeah, that’s what I said, Cas. Did I freakin’ stutter?”

Castiel cocks his head and just looks at him with that peculiar expression of his which is a shade between confused and ‘I’m really not happy with being confused’. As if Dean was doing this on purpose. As if it wasn’t Cas’s own fault for being such a pain in the—

“But you love pie.”

That simple statement makes Dean unreasonably defensive. “Of course I love pie! Everyone loves pie. That doesn’t mean I know how to  _bake one_!”

Castiel just gives him that look again, like Dean’s personally failed him or something.

Dean starts fidgeting. He maybe sweats a little. Then he starts getting  _angry_.

“The hell is wrong with you anyway? We’re in the middle of a full-on West Side Story angel-showdown, and you want to learn how to  _bake_? Are you going to Martha Stewart Metatron to death or something?”

It’s Castiel’s turn to look away now, rubbing his neck in an entirely too-human gesture - as if he’s tired, or he has a crick in his muscles, which Dean knows full well is impossible. “I… have been feeling— adrift, Dean. Since I took on this grace, I…” he shakes his head, as if unable to word this in a way Dean will understand. “It’s not  _my_  grace. It’s power, but— it doesn’t belong inside me. It feels… unstable, as if it could go off at any moment, for all that it is not as strong as I would like it to be.” He looks up again, and this time, when their eyes meet, Dean has to hold his breath a little at how troubled and just…  _wrong_  Cas looks.

“I suppose I wanted to feel… tethered. There is something beautiful about human tasks, even the small ones, that is… finite. Self-sufficient. Mopping up a bathroom can feel like more of an accomplishment than smiting a demon, sometimes.”

He looks down again. “It’s stupid. I’m probably not explaining it well.” He opens his mouth and then clamps it briskly shut, as if he had said too much.

But he’s said enough.

“Right, so.” Dean claps his hands once, before confidently bracing them on his hips, like he has _any godforsaken idea in hell_  what he’s doing. “Let’s bake.”

There’s a beat of silence. Then Cas looks up. If he had to make an estimate, Dean would say he looks 70% skeptical and 30% surprised. As for himself, he knows he looks 100% like he’s bullshitting his way through this, and that Cas is fully aware of this. Thankfully they both pretend not to notice that fact.

“Pie?” asks Castiel, his voice subtly hopeful.

“No, not  _pie_. Who do you think I am, that Ramsay dude? We’re gonna bake something  _easy_ , okay? Now get your ass to the kitchen.”

Castiel gets his ass to the kitchen so fast, he might as well have teleported there.

* * *

 

30 minutes later, Dean is fairly sure that at least seven different things are going all kinds of horribly wrong. There are bits of shells in the egg mixture (Cas’s fault), the butter burned in the pan instead of melting (his fault), they had to throw away the vanilla because it had been mixed with salt instead of sugar (Cas’s fault), and there’s flour all over the floor (both of their faults).

Dean is starting to get an epic headache.

This is ridiculous. He said  _easy_. Cookies are easy, right?

Moreover, he should know how to do this. Sam told him how once, even though Dean had mostly made fun of him all through it for being such a girl.

Then Sam had said, real quiet: “Jess baked me cookies the night that she— well, you know.”

Dean had stopped making fun of him real quick after that, but his throat had been too closed up to pay any attention.

It sort of closes his throat now, too, a little. Jess had seemed like a real good girl. And Sam—  _Sam_.Yeah,  _there’s_  something to feel happy about. They still haven’t managed to track down fucking Gadreel, even though Crowley swears up and down he has his minions looking.

“Dean.”

Castiel’s voice has taken on that familiar, irritating tone of ‘I don’t know how this works, but I expect you to explain it to me and/or do it for me in the next ten seconds’. Dean takes that to mean Cas has been asking him something, and he was too busy  _emoting_  to hear.

“Yeah, Cas, what.”

“The chocolate chips.” Cas’s voice gets marginally gentler. “Do we put them inside the dough now, or later?”

Dean pulls his lips inside his mouth, hands braced on the table in a ‘grant me patience’ motion that Castiel, typically, completely fails to pick up on. They just stare at each other for a moment, then Dean snaps.

“That’s not— that’s not  _dough_ , Cas! Does it look like dough to you? We’ve been throwing random crap in completely random amounts into a bowl! There’s egg shells and clumps of flour and— is that a freakin’  _half lemon_  you threw in? I don’t know what we have there, Cas, but it’s sure as hell  _not_  cookie dough.”

To his credit, Cas takes it remarkably well (which is lucky, because Dean was already beginning to kick himself). He nods once, wary, and squints at the bowl as if it had personally slighted him. Then he tilts his head and sighs. “That… does not look very appetizing, no.”

And just like that, it blows over, and the next moment they’re both chuckling like dumbasses.

“I’m sorry I don’t know how to bake for shit, Cas.” Dean says, resting his back against the counter, voice still shaky with laughter (and God, it feels good to laugh, even for just a minute, even about something so utterly ridiculous). “It’s not exactly a basic requirement for a hunter.”

“It’s all right.” Cas says, still amused himself. “It was a silly request, anyway.” He hesitates a moment, then he leans against the counter as well, edging closer to Dean.

They stay like that for a few minutes, arms almost-but-not-quite-touching, taking in the comfortable silence and the completely fucking soiled kitchen.

“My mom used to bake the most delicious, a-fucking-mazing apple pie,” Dean says, his voice a little rough around the edges, and immediately wonders who the hell gave his mouth permission to open. He hadn’t even known he’d been  _thinking_  that.

Castiel doesn’t say anything, doesn’t even really look at him, for which Dean is grateful, but he tilts his head towards Dean minutely, like a sign of acceptance; ‘go on, I’m listening’.

And what the hell, right? In for a penny and all that crap.

“It was, uh— it was just  _unreal_ , man, I can still smell it. Of course as a kid I didn’t really care how it was made. It was, you know, ‘mom magic’ or whatever.” He shrugs, because of course Cas  _can’t_ know, because Cas never had a mother, but Dean can’t explain it any better than that. “Now, though… I don’t know. I wish she’d taught me. She had a recipe book, but the whole place burned to the ground, so adios to that. I dunno, I guess… if I knew how, maybe it would be like…”

He has to stop for a moment, pick at something non-existent on his shirt sleeve. He swallows before going on - and God help him, he can feel himself turning into a chick even as he speaks - but he goes on, because he  _can’t not_ , because Cas can get these things out of him in a way Dean never allows himself with Sam, because he has to be strong, because he has to be on top of his fucking game for his little brother. ( _Yeah, on top of your game, that’s you, Dean_ , sneers the voice in his head, but he firmly flips it off, because  _enough already, okay_.)

 “I guess it’d be like she was here again. You know, not  _here again_ , but, like. A part of her. I don’t know. It’s dumb.” He clamps his mouth shut, staring at his feet. This is ridiculous. Almost as ridiculous as the fact he can always smell his mom’s perfume whenever he smells apple pie.

Then there’s a hand on his upper arm, the touch solid but unobtrusive. “It’s not dumb, Dean.” Castiel’s voice is so freaking  _gentle_  that it hurts something inside Dean, and for a moment he has the sudden, absolute certainty that Cas doesn’t mean the baking thing, but the other thing, the one he had not said out loud. Dean doesn’t know how to deal with that, so he just nods and leans into the touch. He can’t move, and he can’t look up, because he  _knows_  Cas will be looking at him with so much earnest  _caring_  in those startlingly blue eyes, and he just. He can’t.

So they just stand in the kitchen, a choked-up human and an off-kilter angel with flour on his trenchcoat, and they let the moment pass. Eventually, Cas takes his hand off Dean’s arm and declares he’s going to taste the cookie dough.

Dean stares at him with genuine alarm. “Dude, no.”

“It’s alright,” Cas replies seriously. “I think the Grace inside me will prevent it from causing me permanent harm.”

Dean makes a face, because dude, it’s just badly-made dough, not  _poison_ — and only then it occurs to him that Castiel was  _joking_.

“Hilarious,” he eyerolls, because he’s still not used to the angel’s dry sense of humour, and Cas’s lips quirk upwards minutely.

Somehow they end up eating all the cookie dough (it might have something to do with Castiel basically forcing a wooden spoon inside Dean’s mouth, and Dean being too busy laughing at the flour in Castiel’s hair to defuse the attack). It’s not that bad with the chocolate chips thrown in.  Okay, so Dean has to spit out the bits of egg shell, and so maybe it tastes a bit like salt. So maybe Castiel neglected to mention that the supposed half lemon was actually a piece of grapefruit he found in the fridge, and Dean abuses him verbally for five minutes before shovelling the last of the chocolate chips in his mouth. Castiel scoops up the remnants of the dough with a finger and licks it clean, and then solemnly declares that ‘his stomach feels funny’.

It’s not perfect. But, like them, it works.


End file.
